Stone Kingdoms (12 page)

The house is no different from the others. There is a motorbike draped in an old waterproof propped against the front fence, rosettes of oil staining the pavement and the flagged path to the front door. A burst football slouches and sags on the grass and as I put my hand to the gate, a dog emerges from the side of the house and barks loudly. I hesitate, and as I stand at the gate a woman's face appears at a window. The dog comes closer, testing its own bravery, and then the front door opens and a man stands staring at me. He is about fifty years old, older than I had anticipated, and I can see nothing of Daniel in his face. His hair is grey and the greyness seems to have seeped into the pallor of his skin, settled in the hollows of his cheeks. He is a slight man with a thick neck and lean body. His eyes are dark, laced with suspicion, and he offers no encouragement. It is only when I open the gate and he sees my intention to enter that he speaks for the first time.

‘Stop that noise! Get to bed!'

I
watch the dog slink instantly out of sight and I step towards him and smile. But before I get a chance to speak he takes a look at me and turns away and I hear him call, ‘Cora, there's some woman here for you.' I stand on the doorstep for a minute before she appears. She holds a drying cloth in her hand and the front of her jumper is splashed with water. She is younger than her husband but with the same slightness of frame, the same thinness of face. Her eyes are brown like Daniel's and she has a trace of his features, and when I tell her who I am she hesitates then brings me in.

The room is small but clean and neat, with a three-piece suite taking up most of the floor. There is a wall unit which contains ornaments and sports trophies, and on a shelf a series of family photographs. I stare at the pictures a little too long. She follows my gaze but says nothing. I wonder which of them is Sean. I try to think of something to say. Through the open doorway and beyond the kitchen I can see her husband working in the yard.

‘I just wondered if it would be possible to speak to Daniel, Mrs McCarroll?' She says nothing. ‘I'm one of his teachers and I was worried about him. It's not long now to his exams and I was wondering when he was coming back to school.' She asks me my name again and turns it over in her mouth, her lips silently copying the words. ‘Did Daniel ever mention me? I'm his English teacher. Sometimes we used to talk.'

‘No, I don't think so. Daniel doesn't talk much about school.' There is a vagueness about the way she talks. As she looks at me, it is as if she has trouble focusing on the moment, in understanding who I am or why we're talking.

‘Do you think it might be possible to speak to him?'

She realizes then that she's still holding the drying cloth and drops it on the hearth, sending up a whisper of ash from an unemptied ash tray. She's wearing black leggings which accentuate the thinness of her legs and reveal a raised tributary of blue veins flowing down her instep. She reaches for a
cigarette
packet on the mantelpiece and her hand shakes as she fumbles to strike a match.

‘Daniel isn't here.'

‘Will he be coming back to school?'

She inhales deeply, holding it as long as she can. ‘No he won't be coming back.' She has steadied herself a little, the weight of her words helping to fix her in the moment. ‘Are you the teacher who lends him all the books?'

‘That's right,' I say, grasping frantically at the opening. ‘He's a great reader, Mrs McCarroll, and he's a smart boy – he could do really well if he put his mind to it.'

‘Daniel was always a good reader, right from no age. Sometimes he'd sit and eat his meals and read at the same time, or stay up half the night with some book or other. None of the others was that way - just Daniel.' The memory hurts her–I see it in the sudden blink of her eyes and the slow scribble of her hand across her lap.

‘I'm very sorry for your trouble, Mrs McCarroll.' The words hang there in a pocket of silence and then she nods her head. Now she is going to cry, and I stand up to go to her but stop as her husband appears in the doorway.

‘Why have you come here?' he asks.

‘I wanted to help, because I care about Daniel.'

‘Why should you care?'

‘He's one of my best pupils. I want him to come back to school.'

‘He won't be coming back. He won't be coming back to his home, never mind school. They've seen to that.'

‘Do the police have him?'

‘No, and they never will either if I've anything to do with it. They've taken two of my sons, they'll not take another. Daniel's where they can't touch him and he'll stay there until this war is over and the last Brit's gone home. In a box, if need be.'

He makes himself taller, the angular body tightening into
aggression.
The ash on his wife's cigarette lengthens then slowly crumples on to the floral carpet as she stares past us both at the rain.

‘He won't be coming back to school?' I ask. ‘It would be such a waste, Mr McCarroll.'

‘Waste? How can you come here and talk to me about waste when I've one son in Milltown and one rotting in the Kesh? You think I'm going to start worrying about school? All that matters to me right now is that they don't get their bastard hands on the one son I've left.'

‘Maybe if he came back everything could be sorted out. I could speak for him, tell them what he's really like. He didn't know what he was doing.'

‘You'll not tell them anything because I'm proud of my son and proud of what he did.'

‘You're proud of what happened to those two men?' I've said it before I can stop myself and all it does is provoke him into a tirade of bitterness, his head jerking forwards and his finger pointing out through the window to a world which I have made myself part of.

‘Those two men were fuckin' Brits who got what they deserved, and I'm not going to start feeling sympathy or shame for the likes of you. As far as Daniel and those other men knew, they were two Loyalist gunmen come to kill people like that fucker Stone, and in my book that makes the ones who took them heroes.' He pauses for breath. ‘So let them all cry their phony tears and call us savages if they like, but I don't give a shite what they think, for it's nothing to what they've done to us and our people.'

As he finishes she stands up and passes between us to leave the room. A little spiral of smoke hovers in the air above her seat. I hear her slow tread on the stairs, the sound of her footsteps in the room above. I get up to go.

‘Is there somewhere I can write to Daniel?'

He shakes his head and laughs. ‘No fuckin' way, no fuckin'
way.'
When I am about to open the gate he calls after me. I think he has changed his mind and I stand as the rain sluices through my hair. But when he reappears it is to throw a clatter of books on the oil-smeared path, their white pages flicking open in the grimed hands of the wind, and as the dog comes to sniff amongst them he shouts, ‘We don't need anything belonging to you!' and slams the door.

I look at the books. One of them isn't mine. It's the only one I pick up. As I leave I glance up at the bedroom window, see her watching. I look up at her for a moment until the rain slants across her face and then I go. In the car I look at the book. It's a collection of Irish legends. On the fly leaf it says: To Daniel from Sean, Christmas '82.

10

O'Grady
says do this. Thin arms point skywards like reeds in the water of the sky. O'Grady says do this. Yellow, crepe-soled feet splay apart in the dust, smiles linked across the lines like a filament of light. O'Grady says do that. Two arms mirror mine then disappear into the motionless anonymity of the scores of frozen bodies. Speeding up the commands, O'Grady says, O'Grady says do this. They laugh at my contorted face and try to copy it. O'Grady says do that. I peer into their faces, try to make them laugh, whittle away some more but there are always too many who want to be winners. It's what I taught them best – O'Grady says, then chain tig and hunt the hidden treasure, simple English and songs and rhymes. Nadra taught them geography and writing and maths and sometimes when they grew restless we played O'Grady some more and I gave little prizes to the winners, and sometimes when she wasn't looking to the losers as well. And at first there's only the two of us and almost more children than we can cope with.

They came early each morning to the space we had claimed just outside the perimeter – it had to be close to the compound so that we could bring stuff back and forth, for we knew that to leave it overnight would mean its absorption and adaptation into other functions. There was never much to take. We had eight metal poles, part of the skeleton of a tent, fitted each day into a frame from which we hung a tarpaulin roof. Open on all sides, it still afforded some protection from the sun for those who managed to squeeze beneath, and served to mark out the
location
of the school. There was little equipment available to us apart from what we improvised. A couple of rolls of computer paper, plastic bags of crayons and pens, the four sides of a flattened-out packing case which we used for a blackboard, a chair and a poor assortment of picture books. In the end it didn't matter because there were always going to be more children than we could provide for and so we had to design activities for this growing number. It depended on what else was going on in the camp but we had a core of about a hundred children, double on some days. Medulla proved not to be a problem. We gave the children food – milk and protein biscuits – and once every day Martine would come and check their health. Some days Medulla stood trying to stare us out, lancing the ground with his stick and uttering some curse.

We tried to establish a list of the children in the camp who were without families. There were about twenty in all, some whose parents were dead or had disappeared, some who had become separated on the journey to the camp and others who were dazed and confused about the whereabouts of their families. We took Polaroids of them with their names printed on a little board of wood which they held under their chin and when we toured the satellite camps we showed them round, trying to trace anyone who might know them. I carried the pictures in a little plastic wallet, flicking it open whenever we went somewhere new, hoping always for that sudden gleam of recognition. We tried to take special care of these children, finding them clothing and extra rations when possible. Some of them had retreated far into themselves, indifferent to what went on around them; others clung to our sides trying to make us the mothers they had lost. How they survived I never knew, disappearing each night after school to find some kind of shelter in the crevices and cracks of the camp. All you could hope was that they would survive another night and be there in the morning.

Every family had its own children, its own lives to support,
and
there was nothing, not even a crumb for the ones who belonged to someone else. I couldn't blame them – charity is the consolation of those who have. But sometimes, as I slept in the tent with Martine and Veronica, I thought of them, wondered where they were, and remembered the morning when I had wandered bewildered round the camp and stumbled across their frozen shapes under polythene. When I asked Wanneker if we could build some kind of shelter for them inside the fence, I knew already what the answer would be. That we didn't have the resources needed to assume that responsibility. For the interim at least they had to survive on their own, take their chances with what existed in the camp.

They ranged from about six to fifteen. Two of the older boys became our helpers and helped also to look after the younger ones. Ahmed was quite tall and wore a pair of olive shorts and a purple shirt with rips where the knobs of his shoulder bones poked through. He said his father had been killed by a rival clan and that his mother had died on the long walk to the camp. He had two sisters somewhere but he didn't know where. Iman was smaller, even thinner, and his legs were bowed with rickets. He had walked to Bakalla across the border. They met in the camp and seemed to find solace in one another's company. Each morning they were waiting outside the compound gate to help us carry the equipment to set up the school, and one day Iman told us about his family. They had been herdspeople but had lost their cattle in the years of drought and, encouraged by the Agency, had tried to grow millet on a plot of land they had been given. After the crop failed two years in a row, they lost everything. One day his father walked away and didn't come back. They found his body hanging from a tree. His mother took the rest of the family and set off to find relations in the South, but he set out on his own and eventually wound up in the camp.

They both displayed a determination to survive, a desire to claim some better inheritance, and if I could have given it to
them
I would have. But all I could do was share the little I had and occasionally slip them something as a payment for their help. Ahmed had a little reed flute and sometimes Iman would shuffle and scuff his feet in a dance. And sometimes, too, Ahmed would play and lead singing while they made me dance, a kind of shapeless sway but performed with something that almost felt like joy. Because sometimes in Bakalla I wanted to dance, because there, in the midst of hardship and human suffering, I experienced moments of happiness such as I have never known. Moments when it was possible for the smallest fragments of joy to magnify and illuminate the darkest parts of yourself. In the tenacious struggle for survival there was an awareness of the preciousness of life, a raw, fierce commitment to it. In the face of that struggle, nothing else mattered. There was only that life and those children, and my memories were only the ragged cast-offs of another place. I never healed anyone, never saved anyone or diagnosed an illness, but each day I felt as if my hand touched something real and was touched in return. What I did had no special virtue, probably no lasting value, but it seemed that it was right for me and those around me.